In conventional online social and professional networks, users connect to each other randomly without an organized group of disciplines, expertise, interests, or experience and without specified industry and small business categories. This creates a network of people in which a user is automatically connected with different users without any distinction between professional and social content. This makes it difficult for a user to organize his professional and social interests and sustain discrete social and professional networking at the same time. These social and professional networking methods and systems do not provide a learning platform database for professional development wherein users can share knowledge, expertise and experience. Students often get involved in random groups without organized industry categories, and these random groups do not help them connect to the right professionals and industries. The existing social and professional networking methods and systems do not provide training facilities to users for professional or personal development.
An embodiment of the present invention comprises a method and system of networking socially and professionally based on categorized industrial sectors. An embodiment can facilitate building unique professional and social user profile; discovering social and professional connections; organizing information socially and professionally via categorized industrial sectors; sharing ideas, asking questions and getting answers; creating and organizing events; creating and accessing training courses under a training center, claiming professional development hours and requesting lunch and learn sessions; creating and sharing “101” pages and content; exploring schools, colleges, universities and other educational institutions; exploring industries, small businesses, and related organizations; creating academic, industrial, professional and social projects and submitting bids and proposals; creating fundraising, academic, and social projects; accessing and submitting products and services; writing articles and blogs and sharing news; chatting online with connections; conducting and accessing webinars and webcasts; following people, pages, groups, and teams; creating groups, forums, and events; stay connected and build the team to discover ideas, execute a project, and work together to achieve the target.
Social networking platforms and professional networking platforms exist aimed toward either social networking or professional networking of people but not both on single platform. Thus, while social networking platforms and professional networking platforms, including Facebook, Yammer, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and the like exist, and enterprise-specific networking, and some social networking sites, such as Facebook, provide a either social or professional networking platform, it becomes very difficult to maintain both professional and social user profiles under such a networking platform. Moreover, such networking platforms do not provide content, newsfeeds, and posts of user specific interest in an organized manner and with filtered categories.
The need to maintain content, newsfeed and posts relevant to user's specific interest or particular industry, professional or social categories or sector is important for effective networking of people either socially or professionally. An embodiment of the present invention can help a user to organize, maintain and build his both social and professional profile under single networking platform; organize content, newsfeed and posts to user's interests under organized system of filtered professional, social, industry and consumer market categories and sectors.